Some Goodies

Well, today was a good day in that I found out we get lots more channels than originally thought! That’s right, Bravo, Cartoon Network, ESPN 2, MTV, etc., etc. It was a momentous discovery. Almost as impressive as finding the casserole dish with a cover at Target. Plus, the DSL equipment should be coming pretty soon. I’ll be visiting family this weekend, so probably no blogs until Tuesday.

I caught the MTV Video Music Awards show. It was pretty boring and I turned it off in the middle of 50 Cent’s performance. The VMAs are not nearly as entertaining as the Movie Awards are. The Movie Awards have great spoofs and the hosts are more interesting. Chris Rock hit some pretty low, but funny lines early in the show, but by the end he was basically reduced to one-liners to introduce presenters.

I had an interesting discussion with a cab driver today. He had been a cabbie in NYC before and so we got to reminiscing about the good old North. He told me about how he got pulled over by every cop in Williamsburg when he started, because he tried to pull stunts like driving on the sidewalk to get around slow moving cars. Man, those NYC cab drivers are hardcore.

Raaaaaaaight….

One last post before I depart for a few days: What is your battlecry?

Apparently in real life, I would clutch a vorpal blade and utter a vengeful cry of, “I’m going to beat you until you acquire caulrophobia, and trade you for a candy bar!!” and my screen name me would utter some stuff that really shouldn’t be printed here…. wtf???

Nerdy News

Sure they’re British, but check out the products at Cash’n'Carrion. I especially liked their “O’Really” stuff that spoofs those wonderful O’Reilly guides. The only thing I wished they carried was stupid 1337-speak gear. That would roxxor =).

Anyway, I recently heard about the “Death of Netscape” and I thought I’d offer some thoughts. Yes, I know this isn’t exactly breaking news, but everybody was complaining about the rash of virus infections months after Microsoft had already posted a patch for it. There is another article from the same website located here. When I first started designing webpages, I primarily designed in Netscape and checked for IE compatibility. This has changed dramatically in recent years, as now I design using IE as my default browser and give just passing glances at how my page looks in Netscape (if it displays, that’s good enough for me). In some ways, I like the fact that I don’t need to pull crazy tricks to make sure my pages look nice in both browsers. Because so few people use Netscape nowadays, the fact that Netscape doesn’t seem to display my CSS right doesn’t even bother me. While my lazy side enjoys the standardization, my logical side tells me that this development will allow Microsoft to continue to offer a mediocre browser product. It used to be that Netscape’s browser was far superior to IE, but with the release of Netscape 6.0, I became convinced that this was no longer the case. Man, I hated that browser. For the most part, I never went back. In recent times, more and more people have done what I did and simply designed for IE, and Netscape has had a steady decline in popularity.

For those of you Microsoft-haters out there, there is still some hope, mostly in the forms of Opera and the Mozilla Foundation. Once I get broadband, I may download and try these two browsers, but it’s very likely I won’t bother checking their compatibility with my website any time soon. Tycho from Penny Arcade, chimed in on this debate a little while ago. Even though I haven’t tried either yet, I will share my first impressions of each. While screenshots may not do them justice, I can’t see what separates Mozilla 1.4 or Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 from IE, or even previous incarnations of Netscape. I checked out their suggested reasons to switch and was not particularly impressed. There are mods of IE that offer tabbed browsing or popup blocking, and hard drive space is pretty easy to come by nowadays. And because so many people design for IE, it’s hard to see a different browser having better compatibility. I don’t hate Microsoft enough to use Linux (XP was a fairly solid product in spite of security holes), and I don’t think I hate IE enough to use Mozilla. I’ll see if they change my mind in the future. As for Opera, there seem to be no major improvements, and instead there are ads while you browse! And you have to pay to get the ads off! I know they’re trying to make money, but IE is already installed and free. With no ads. Opera would have to be insanely better to justify paying for it, and I see this as being an even bigger longshot then Mozilla.

Also, is there really any point to skinning your browser? I believe a good browser shouldn’t take up a lot of space with its interface, ergo there should be very little area to skin.

Larry Flips Him the Bird!

Here’s a story from the NBA world (no, not Kobe). All I can say is, it’s about time. As great a player as he might have been, Isiah was not a good coach. That’s just from an objective viewpoint. As a Knicks fan, I think it’s a shame they fired him since I enjoyed the thought of Pacer fans beating their heads in over his boneheaded rotations. Maybe I can stop hating on Pacers once Reggie Miller retires. We’ll see about that, though.